The Joy of Having to Work

How the burden of having to support my family sets me free.

I was a 19-year-old college sophomore the year I took care of Brooks and Hunter. They were nine and seven, respectively, and the job—pick them up from school, stay with them until dinner—seemed so easy, especially compared with my summer's toil: 60-hour weeks tending to four children, including a two-year-old whose parents insisted he was potty trained (he wasn't) and a five-year-old with a speech impediment, the frustrations of which left her prone to inconsolable tantrums. I had been caring for children since I was 12, and I could take "accidents," screams, fights, tears, and whining in stride. But Brooks and Hunter—I wasn't prepared for those boys. Brooks was happy when we sat together at the kitchen table and did our homework, though he was even happier when we traded stories about our lives. Hunter, stocky and already bigger than his brother (he would be a talented football player in high school), loved to show me how strong he was by wrapping his arms around my waist and lifting me off the ground.

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Brooks and Hunter were smart and sweet and quick to belly laugh, which surprised me, because their mother had died six months earlier. I hadn't known what that would mean, hadn't realized that I'd be the woman in their lives. Need I even say that for the first time I fell in love with my charges? I had a boyfriend when I met them, but our relationship didn't survive the winter. Romantic and maternal bonds may not really be comparable, but it's hard to keep saying "I love you" after you realize what actual love is. The intensity of emotion I felt for Brooks and Hunter was, at 19, overwhelming. Why couldn't I just be a normal college student, studious and perpetually hungover, I often wondered, rather than someone who thought constantly about two boys to whom I had no claim? Yet, until I met my husband years later, it was the best, most cherished love I'd known.

I don't have children myself, although I would like to very much, which is perhaps too casual a phrasing for a profound yearning. How could I go through life without knowing that love again? But for now I listen to mothers tell me (as they seem to like to say to any woman who doesn't have a child), "You don't understand." Translation: I don't understand what it means to love a child, how it changes your priorities, your ambitions, your desire to work. There's little I can say in response, because no mother believes a childless woman can truly fathom that love, and I'm willing to concede that perhaps I don't. Though if I'm being honest, I don't believe that at all. I think I do know what it means—at least enough to be grateful that I have to work.

Grateful to have to work! Even five years ago, I never would have said such a thing, but that was before I'd given any real thought to what my life might look like with a child. Before the articles, the movies, the books—the myriad ways we rehash our struggle to have it all (or just declare, as Anne-Marie Slaughter did recently in The Atlantic, that we can't)—suddenly seemed relevant. Before friends confided the guilt they felt at having to leave a young son or daughter for hour after hour. Before I watched quite a few women give up their careers to stay at home. I may not have had a child, but I was already unnerved about the choices I'd have to make.

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Until I realized, with a weird glee, that I would have no choices. Like 22 percent of American women in relationships, I am my family's primary breadwinner. It's not simply that I earn more than my husband, though I do, it's also that my job has benefits, including all-important health insurance. Which means that I, like my father, am the one responsible for my family's financial security. As a child, I'd catch snippets of conversation that I now know meant my father worried about that responsibility, but he also took great pride and pleasure in his work—as I do in mine. (Granted, I'm not laboring in a factory or earning minimum wage, which makes my job much easier to love.) And so for now, having to work seems to promise freedom—freedom to know that working will be the best thing I can do for my child, freedom not to give in to the guilt, freedom to enjoy what I do.

Here's the thing about all the anxiety: As often as not, it's expressed by women who have a fair number of choices. And yet somehow having those choices has come to feel like a kind of tyranny. My mother, an emigrant who couldn't speak English when she left Hungary in her twenties, did not do any paid work, though she did keep our house spotless and cooked dinner each night; she also shuttled me and my sister wherever we needed to go (be it school or the mall), picked up supplies for our science projects, attended all our plays and soccer games, and made certain the shirts we wanted to wear the next day were ironed. She did everything a mother was supposed to do—including telling us, without a trace of resentment, not to be like her.

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"You're too smart," she told us, though I wasn't so smart that I didn't often think something was wrong with all the mothers like her—why didn't they have jobs? "Why is [my education] important if I'm just going to grow up and be a mommy like you?" a little girl asks her stay-at-home mother in Hanna Rosin's The End of Men. In my most judgmental moments, when I hear about another woman forgoing her career because her child comes first, I wonder whether, these days, that's what putting a child first really should look like. My friends' children are just toddlers, but already their parents are imagining what Betsy and Stella and Maud might one day accomplish—and not one of them hopes her daughter will cast aside her aspirations to just be a mother herself, though, of course, I'd never be so callous as to point that out.

Just as I don't say "What did you expect?" when one of them complains about how bored she is. These are women who for years have spent their every day—in college, graduate school, and then at a job—engaged with a world so much larger than the playground; mothering can fulfill many needs, but let's not pretend that it's often intellectually stimulating.

Which is why I wonder, when I listen to women beat themselves up for being bad mothers because they have careers, how we all got so duped. Most of us had working fathers, after all. Shouldn't we be toasting our good fortune not to have to change quite so many diapers, not to have to push the swing for quite so long, not to have to read Green Eggs and Ham a thousand times? Not for nothing, I think, my husband spent his formative years watching TV in an elderly woman's basement while his mother and father tried to make ends meet. When I say that today he is just fine, I'm selling him short. Neither of his parents thought the situation ideal, but there weren't a lot of options, and even as a child my husband understood that.

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It's because I know how susceptible I'll be not only to the guilt—why did I have a baby, if I didn't intend to raise her myself—but also to the piercing joy of a child that I'm glad I won't have a choice. But I understand that the tedium of child rearing—and my engrossing work—means nothing next to the perfect fleeting moments, some of which I will definitely miss if I'm employed outside the home. There will be times, I'm sure, when my longing to be with my child will plague me, but I'll remind myself that there's no other choice to be made: My income will be essential to giving my child a decent life. Peace of mind, at least relatively speaking.

I don't remember whether Brooks and Hunter's mother had worked. I know their father did; at the worst point in their lives, when he wanted only to be with them as much as possible, he had a job to do. He didn't pick them up from school, he couldn't always help with their homework, and he missed the occasional dinner. But I spent enough time with Brooks and Hunter to know that they didn't really care about what their father couldn't do. I might have loved those two boys, but they loved their dad.

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